Page 45 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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were provided with the Emancipation Proclamation by the thirteenth, fourteenth (as-
sured due process), and fifteenth (extended franchise to Black males) amendments.
Commenting on these conditions, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “The pen of the
Great Emancipator had moved the Negro [sic] into the sunlight of physical freedom,
but actual conditions had left him behind in the shadow of political, psychological, so-
97
cial, economic and intellectual bondage.”
The federal government later abandoned its reformist policies of the First Re-
construction and allowed the emergence of White terrorist organizations, such as Ku
Klux Klan, the Knights of Camellia, and the White League of Louisiana, which were
determined to reestablish White supremacy. Southern Whites developed Black codes
to disenfranchise and control African Americans.All Blacks were seen as servants by
Whites.Whites for whom they worked were seen as masters. Black workers were not
allowed to leave the premises without permission.They were only allowed to work
as farm and domestic workers.They were not allowed to join the militia or possess
firearms.African Americans needed special license to preach.They were not permit-
ted to negatively react to Whites even if they were abused, insulted, hurt, or beaten.
They were not allowed to testify against Whites. Black men were not allowed to look
at White women.
White America enforced these Jim Crow laws through primitive kinds of social
control, such as lynching, torture, terror, mutilation, rape, castration, and imprison-
ment. There were Black men, women, and children who were burned alive. Other
Black men were castrated with axes or knives, or blinded with hot pokers or decapi-
tated. Furthermore, African Americans were denied equal citizenship and suffrage
rights.They were excluded from public facilities and the American political process by
different measures, such as the poll tax, residential requirements, insufficient literacy to
interpret a section of the Constitution, the “good character” test, registration proce-
dures implemented through trickery, criminal records, having to produce a responsi-
ble White witness for worthiness, the “grandfather Clause,” 98 an all-White primary,
and intimidation and violence.All these conditions and economic factors forced them
to migrate to urban areas.
Migration, Urban Community Formation, and Nationalism
The great migration of African Americans from rural America to urban America and
from the South to the North occurred between 1915 and 1960, when about five mil-
lion of them moved due to economic problems, political and social repression. 99
Nicholas Lemann notes that this “migration was one of the largest and most rapid
mass internal movements of people in history.” 100 This great migration was seen by
some scholars as the search for political and economic freedom. For example,Alferd-
teen Harrison argues that “the cause for the ‘Great Migration’ was the African-Amer-
ican’s continuing pilgrimage in search of an acceptable status in America . . . because
the status of the African-American as a slave and then as a ‘Jim Crow’ citizen were un-
acceptable, the migration was a continuation of the search.” 101 Neil R. McMillen also
considers this migration a “black protest against the outrages of lynching and injustice
in the courts, protest against white notions of black character . . . protest against the
disfranchisement, the discrimination, the exclusion, and the segregation that defined
the black place in what was then often called ‘a Whiteman’s country.’” 102 The “push”
factors for the migration were the reduction of the demand for Black labor due to the